Britain Taught Brazilian Dictatorship to Torture

LATIN AMERICA AND THE CARIBBEAN, 15 Dec 2014

TeleSur – TRANSCEND Media Service

British troops in Northern Ireland 1970s

Brazilian interrogators learned techniques from the British army, which had mastered their psychological torturing skills on suspected republicans in Northern Ireland.

British army officers trained Brazilian police in torture methods, perfected in Northern Ireland against people opposing British rule there, a report into human rights abuses during the dictatorship revealed.

Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff, who was tortured herself by the regime in the 1970s, wept as she presented the 2,000 page Truth Commission document Wednesday [10 Dec 2014], which confirmed that 191 were killed and 243 disappeared.

Not only did Brazilian officials travel to the UK to learn the “English System,” but the study also shows that British officers returned the visit, teaching extreme interrogation at Brazilian police headquarters.

“At the end of 1970 we sent a group of army officers to England to learn the English system of interrogation. This consists of putting the prisoner in a cell incommunicado, a method known as the ‘refrigerator’,” the report quotes former general Hugo de Andrade Abreu.

Psychological torture techniques were adopted that the British mastered in Northern Ireland, designed to destabilize the suspect to the point of admitting to a crime.

“They were variations on the techniques used by the British army against Irish terrorists,” said Amilcar Lobo, an army psychiatrist who worked in a torture center nick-named the ‘house of death’, “they were destined to destructure the personality of the prisoners without touching them.”

Though more subtle, the study also uncovered British admission of involvement in the scheme, as well as the desire to disassociate themselves from it. The practices that the British taught Brazil were banned by Prime Minister Edward Heath in 1972, deemed too barbaric.

The Brazilian report, which took three years to complete, contains a secret letter from the British ambassador of the time, David Hunt. He wrote in 1972, “As you know, I think, they have in the past been influenced by suggestions and advice emanating from us; but this connection no longer exists … It is important that knowledge of this fact should be restricted.”

Another British official in Brazil, Sir Alan Munro, also alluded to the Northern Ireland link. “If the Brazilians were looking for techniques of interrogation used by British authorities, the example would have been the early years of Northern Ireland. This would have been undertaken on a Brazilian initiative, and the extent that it might reduce the most brutal methods, it would have been a step in the right direction,” he said to investigators.

Brazil was under an authoritarian military dictatorship from 1964 until 1985.

Go to Original – telesurtv.net

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